Keeping Simplelog Simple

Several months ago I decided I would finally enter the world of weblogs. I’ve had a list of ideas going for sometime and it was finally time to take the plunge and develop them. Like many others I looked at the usual suspects: Moveable Type, Wordpress, Expression Engine, etc. One thing that started to influence my choice was Ruby on Rails. In the last 9 months or so I’ve had lots of opportunity to work inside of the MVC model so it eventually became a criteria that the solution rely on rails. At the time I knew of only two players within the rails world, Typo and Mephisto. Many were making the move to Mephisto and the plugin architecture was growing with the community, I thought it was a no brainer. Then Garrett Dimon wrote his post titled ”A Closer Look at SimpleLog”. It completely changed my perspective, I was faced with a choice between a blogging solution that clearly had more features and a solution that at the time looked like a stripped down but very elegant tool. I tried a version a friend had installed and over the next few days really wrestled with making the choice, I wanted the tool that would ideally help me to write more often and flesh out my ideas faster. In the end user experience won me over and I installed Simplelog as my blogging solution.

Extending with creative solutions

After I started to build out my theme within Simplelog it was clear that many of the little frills I wanted weren’t available right out of the box. After cruising the forums and exchanging a few emails with Simplelog’s creator, Garrett Murray, it was clear that many of the things I wanted to do were either in the works, or simply weren’t part of the core vision. Instead of seeking another feature heavy solution I enlisted a friend of mine to help me find a few creative ways to pull off what I wanted.

I wanted to do 99% of my publishing though the Simplelog UI instead of having to mess with the view layer once the site launched. At first glance this seamed simple but I had these little sidebar areas I wanted to update regularly: recommendations, things of interest, links to friends. A solution that came out of the forums was to tag certain posts with something I could filter with, this would give me the ability to just display posts tagged with “X”. This was a great idea but there wasn’t anything that would prevent those items from showing up in the normal article area. The solution we eventually came to was to tag it with a specific tag but not activate it, then we would grab those posts and display them in their selected areas. Was it as easy as having some sort of categories or snippets right inside of the Simplelog interface? Probably not, but it didn’t take that much effort either.

I also wanted to feature some flickr and last.fm data in my footer. I had seen similar plugins available for other blogging solutions but the Simpleblog community was still growing and there wasn’t anything developed like that (yet). With Flickr’s easy badging code and some CSS changes I was able to implement it pretty easily. The last.fm area was scrapped from the HTML in my albums chart. The album artwork isn’t available in the XML feed yet so we resorted to scrapping for now.

Staying happy with simple

At the end of the day I’m extremely happy. Sure, it might have taken a bit more time and some creative solutions to get my blog to the point that I wanted but now I get to use an incredibly simple yet extremely thought out interface to do all of my authoring in. After all isn’t that why I started blogging?

Sidenote:

This entry could have been three times as long by going into all of the ins and outs of Simplelog. Garrett Dimon has already done such a nice job that I encourage all of you not familiar with Simplelog to read though his piece.